November 26, 2017

Peter Pan and Davy Crockett

by JanieM

How about a different topic to argue about?

Gender is nice and juicy, but in case that doesn't suit, let's just say that if we can start with Turkey Day and get to an unhappy debate about the Civil War, it would be superfluous to declare this an open thread.

In December of 1955 I asked for, and got, a Davy Crockett suit for Christmas. (No link for this one, sorry.)

I was five. That was probably the last time during my childhood when my tomboyish preferences were honored without opposition or commentary.

As a young adult, I remembered Mary Martin’s Peter Pan as a sort of fifties It Gets Better video, reassuring me at a subliminal level that it was okay to be the tomboy that I was shaping up to be. A girl could be boyish! In my world, who knew!

Wikipedia says that the 1960 version of Peter Pan (still Mary Martin) was rebroadcast in 1963 and 1966. I don’t think I saw those, but I do remember wondering, when I was in my late twenties, why we never saw Peter Pan on TV the way we saw, let’s say, The Wizard of Oz at least annually (around Easter time for many years, IIRC). I can’t find corroboration now, but I believe that at the time I read that whoever owned the rights to the Peter Pan film was holding on tight and not doing any kind of deal that would let it be shown.

Then, in 1990, the 1960 production of Peter Pan was released on video. My kids were three and five years old, and I couldn’t wait to share this childhood treasure with them.

We did enjoy it, but my immediate reaction was bemusement at how “girly” Mary’s Peter seemed thirty-five years later.

The quest is by no means over, but we’ve made (to me) surprisingly fast progress in gender matters, and LGBT issues more generally, during my lifetime. As recently as the year 2000, when I proposed a “third circle” at a gender workshop and most of the other attendees had no idea what I was getting at, I wouldn’t have believed it if you’d told me that in 2017 Danica Roem would be elected to the Virginia state legislature.

Comments

I would say we have made far more progress on one side than on the other.

These days, a woman who enters a "male profession" may face some discrimination, but nobody much still argues that she shouldn't be allowed to try. (The Army Rangers have fallen, which leaves anything less physically demanding without much of a leg to stand on.) There's still some negative reaction, at least from some people, to a woman acting masculine (whatever that means to them), but far more people just shrug and move on.

But a man who acts "feminine" or enters what is regarded (decreasingly, perhaps, but still) as a "female profession"? Much more negative reaction.

And, look at the extreme: teenagers. Who, after all, are in the process of working out how to be men or women.

A teenage girl can pretty much do what she wants. Some negative feedback from her peers, perhaps, but not all that much. She'd probably get more negative reaction for being a "nerd".

But a teenage boy who acts "girlish"? Even today, as much as things have improved on that front, he's going to get it early and often from his peers. Being gay is one thing; that's no longer anywhere near as big a deal as it once was. But not acting masculine? Bad. Very bad.

I admit to some optimism that things will continue to improve on this front. But there is still a ways to go -- and more for the guys.

wj -- totally agree, and it was ever thus. Despite constant resistance and sometimes bitching from the adults in my life, I had a far easier time as a girl who loved math and wanted to play army and football with the boys than any boy of my generation would have had if he'd loved dolls and wanted to play house with the girls.

Nowadays no one blinks at a girl in pants, but a guy in a skirt? Good luck. Even that is slowly changing, but IME only in little tolerant pockets. When my kids were in high school there was a boy who wore dresses to school, and one of the senior girls appointed herself his bodyguard -- she walked around school with him whenever she could, daring anyone to be an asshole.

Also -- universal clarification for anything I write about this -- as in wj's comment, pretty much any gender-weighted word can be considered to be in quotation mark. I don't consider them scare quotes (I don't know why that phrase was ever invented), but rather "this word is heavily weighted with more nuance than is practical to include every time we use the word" quotes.

It's going to be a long time before we can all talk about this using the same words, if we ever get there at all. I'm not on Facebook, which may account for the fact that I'm so out of date (three+ years?) that I thought there were only fifty-six gender options. Apparently there are now 71? Or maybe that's only in the UK. Or only in the US. Or something.

Since the OT mentioned Peter Pan, and now is morphing into issues of cross-dressing, I would be remiss in not mentioning the old theatrical tradition of The Dame in English Pantos.

A tradition that never made it far beyond the shores of the UK, so unlikely to be familiar to most here (with notable exceptions); more info at www.its-behind-you.com, as we now are near the beginning of the Panto season.

The panic over men doing anything feminine is just the flip side, the cost to men, of the higher social valuation of masculinity and masculine things. Women do pay for it in countless ways. But it's true that it gets them some greater latitude in behavior.

Nursing in the US is similar - an approximate 10:1 female to male ratio, but men get paid more. Who'd a thunk?

Generally, or in specific circumstances?

When I was younger I had a friend who spent six months of the year surfing, and six months working as a nurse. He was 6'2" and 215 pounds, had the necessary nursing certifications, and was trained in some form of martial arts that emphasized locks that could immobilize people without damaging them. Pretty much quoting him: "I can fly into any metro area in the US, start walk-in interviews at specialized facilities on Monday, and have three job offers by Friday."

He got the job offers despite being up front that in six months he would be quitting so he could go surf, and said that he got premium salaries and promotion opportunities as well.

...even among strong copyright supporters, it is generally assumed that, eventually, all works will be freely available for others to build upon, publisher or otherwise copy.

My impression is that we've moved a long way away from the old copyright rules. Or, what wj said, and I’ll leave it at that and not, this morning, get started on big corporations…controlling…everything…forever...skimming...everything...in perpetuity....

In opera there are a (very) few female roles traditionally sung by men (I can remember just now only two: the witch in Hansel and Gretel and the giantess cook in The love for three oranges*) but lots and lots of 'trouser roles', i.e. male roles sung by women (in essence all children parts are given to females too).
While we are at opera, interestingly the roles originally written for castrates were until very recently generally switched to bass (now countertenors seem to have taken the roles back at least around here and alto women took them in other places). Many don't like this return to the original because for them it has gay and/or effeminate implications that clearly were not in the mind of the composers (but get played up in many productions).

My niece has three kids. Twin girls and a little. I think the girls just turned 7, the boy is 3. One of the girls is, for lack of a better word, very girly. The other is basically a boy. Boy clothes, boy activities, sometimes boy name. Her son is pretty much a boy.

We have friends who have two adopted Asian girls. When the second girl arrived, she and girl number one seemed to carve out the gender turf. Girl number two claimed the girly space, girl number one became more of a tomboy. They sort of maintain that, although each of the boundaries have softened over the years.

My minister was recently informed by his 11 year old son that he (the son) planned to be the first gay President. This was news to my minister, on both counts.

People are who they are. Sometimes 'who they are' changes over time. I'm glad we live at a time when there is some kind of room for that.

Actively disliked Sandy Duncan, she seemed prissy or something. Superduper square. My ten-years-old would be the Kennedy administration and remember no crushes. Never liked any Peter Pan I saw, always lacked the specific internal edginess of a pre-pubescent asshole. I have read the book.

If you are sneering at the audience's taste, which Shakespeare necessarily played to, like any artist trying to make a living, then put the blame where it belongs.

If you are going to call Shakespeare a "hack", you really ought to be talking about his craftsmanship: the way the plays are structured, the way the characters are drawn, etc. Of course, the trouble with that approach is that he actually was an extremely good craftsman, and not a hack at all.

Same could be said about the old Roman comedies that were without exception adaptations of Greek plays. The Roman playwrights had to alter them significantly because the Greeks expected a coherent plot and the Romans slapstick where the plot could be reduced to an excuse. Plus in Greece going to the theatre was more or less a civic duty while in Rome it was always suspect to the authorities who would not allow for a permanent theatre building for literally centuries (and the first one got nearly torn down the moment it was finished and survived just by being declared a temple with the rows of seats as the steps leading up to the altar). And we know that there was a stiff competition between the theatre and other lowbrow entertainment. One playwright put it into the prologue that the last time he had tried to stage that play they had to stop mid-performance because the whole audience left to watch a tightrope walker instead.
Shakespeare faced the same problems and without a doubt had read English translations of Plautine (and maybe Terentian) plays. The main difference is that he mixed comedy and tragedy which was impossible in the ancient world.

Had any Roman tried anything Aristophanean, he would have been dead or in exile before you could say Gnaeus Naevius ;-)
But even in Greece the 'old comedy' died with Athenian democracy (some of Aristophanes' late works are already counted as 'medium'. Roman comedies are derived from the 'new' without exception*).

The Greeks had no problem with slapstick or fourth wall breaking per se as long as there still was a coherent plot (and/or overarching theme). And many of the Aristophanean jokes would have gone right above the head of most Romans (and like with Shakespeare we today may not get all of them either).

*talking about classical comedies not the 'commedia dell'arte' or 'peasant theatre' type (the latter could be compared to Laurel&Hardy shorts just with two added sidekicks).